Abstraction licence compliance

ABSTRACTION LICENCE COMPLIANCE

In order to legally abstract water from a watercourse for use within a washing plant, an Environment Agency Abstraction Licence is required. it is common practice for aquatic invertebrate monitoring to be conditioned under the terms of the licence to guard against the risk that the process might have a significant effect upon the biodiversity within a watercourse due to abstraction affecting the water flow. The data gathered are analysed to produce two scores that determine whether or not abstraction is deleterious, these comprise:

A Species Quality Index (SQI) score and
A Lotic-invertebrate Index for Flow Evaluation (LIFE) score

AEcol design and perform such monitoring for a wide range of quarry types in various geographical locations and, as with all our work; if a negative effect is identified we work with the quarry to seek a method of mitigating the effect with the minimum impact upon productivity.